Suffer the Children: The Tragic Fate of Vulnerable Kids in Canadian Governmental Care

16. Governmental Kidnapping of Indigenous Children

To Canada’s south, American officialdom oscillated between attempts to push the Natives into impoverished reservations at the milder end of things, and genocidal attempts to outright exterminate them at the more extreme end. In all scenarios, both in the US and Canada, the consequences were often tragic and horrific for the Natives. In Canada, the Residential School System kidnapped Indigenous children from their families, and placed them in boarding schools where they were often subjected to neglect, sundry abuses, and cruel treatment. As seen below, thousands died as a result, and their bodies were dumped in unmarked graves on school grounds.

15. Indian Residential Schools

For about a century and a half, from 1863 to 1998, over 130 Indian Residential Schools were funded by the Canadian government. Until 1969, many of those schools were administered by Christian churches. In 1894, attendance at day schools where available, or boarding schools where day schools were unavailable, was made mandatory for Indigenous children. Many Indigenous communities were too remote for day schools, so boarding schools became the only option for their children. If families refused to part with their kids, the authorities went ahead and forcibly seized them, then placed them in boarding schools.

14. Mistreatment in Indian Residential Schools

Indian Residential school children were often cut off from contact with their families. Both because of the long distances involved, and because their parents needed passes to leave the Indigenous reservations – passes that the authorities often refused to grant. In the meantime, the children were often abused in all kinds of ways by teachers and administrators. The Indigenous kids in the boarding schools were poorly fed – and sometimes not fed for days on end – and frequently suffered from malnutrition. They were frequently subjected to harsh discipline, including severe corporal punishment that would not have been tolerated in white Canadian schools.

13. A Shocking Death Toll

Cruel treatment was bad enough. On top of that, Indigenous kids in the mandatory boarding schools were often housed in overcrowded dormitories. Sanitation was poor, the water was unclean, sewage was inadequate or nonexistent, and the heating was insufficient to cope with Canada’s harsh winters. Between that and an absence of medical care, diseases such as tuberculosis and influenza were rife. Because the amount of federal funding depended on enrollment figures, schools enrolled sick children to boost their numbers. In one school, student death rates reached 69 percent. About 150,000 Indigenous kids were placed in mandatory schools. Because of poor record keeping, the number of school deaths is unknown, but estimates range from a low of 3200 to highs of more than 30,000.

12. Residential Schools Produced Graduates Who Were Neither Indigenous, Nor White

Perhaps the final tragic twist in a tale already full of the tragic is that the end result of the Indigenous kids’ education was often adults who were unable to fit back into their original communities. After years of speaking only English or French in boarding schools, many had forgotten their Indigenous languages by the time they graduated, and were no longer able to communicate with their relatives. However, they were still Indigenous. Despite the Residential School System’s professed assimilationist intent, the graduates were denied assimilation because of the racist and exclusionary attitudes of mainstream white Canadian society.

11. The Other Time Canadian Authorities Forcibly Seized and Raised Children

The indigenous residential school scandal was not the only tragic event visited upon Canadian children by the authorities. In the twentieth century, in a bid to curb an admittedly problematic religious sect, officials forcibly seized its members’ children, separated them from their families, and raised them in foster care or state institutions. Their targets were the Doukhobors, or “Spirit Warriors”, a pacifist and anti-materialist Russian Christian sect that formed in the seventeenth century. Their belief that a divine spirit resides in everybody raised eyebrows in Russia.

10. The Spirit Warriors

What got the Doukhobors in serious trouble, however, was their penchant for nudity to emulate Adam and Eve, a tendency to swap wives, plus a notion that nobody has any right to worldly goods. The result was centuries of persecution of the Spirit Warriors. Officials especially detested the Doukhobors’ pacifism, which led them to refuse conscription into the Russian military. The persecution’s intensity waxed and waned over the years, and ranged from beatings to imprisonment to exile to death. They nonetheless had some influential supporters, such as Leo Tolstoy, who became a Doukhobor patrion in the nineteenth century. However, even Tolstoy’s patronage could not shield the Spirit Warriors. So they headed to Canada.

9. A Religious Barrier to Swearing Allegiance to the Crown

Early in the twentieth century, the Doukhobors emigrated to Canada in search of religious freedom. Things began well, but misunderstandings soon set in motion a tragic chain of events. The end result was that the Spirit Warriors morphed in Canada from an odd sect and into a dangerous one. They became famous for mass nudist protests, and infamous for arsons on a massive scale. The Doukhobors first arrived in Saskatchewan in 1902, their emigration facilitated by Leo Tolstoy and the Society of Friends, or Quakers. At first, the Canadians saw the industrious Spirit Warriors as ideal settlers. At the time, the Canadian government granted 160 acres of land for a nominal fee of $10 to any male homesteader, provided he established a farm within three years. However, because of their religious beliefs, the new arrivals could not swear allegiance to the Crown.

8. The Splintering of the Spirit Warriors

Inability – or unwillingness – to swear allegiance to the Crown disqualified the Doukhobors from receiving land grants. They saw that as a breach of promises made by the authorities. Embittered, they trekked to British Columbia, where they established drab little communal villages. The Spirit Warriors’ leader, a charismatic figure named Peter Verigin, maintained a semblance of control over his nudist followers by flogging them with brambles. Then some Doukhobors blew him up with dynamite in 1924. With their leader’s demise, the Spirit Warriors fractured into rival factions, and things swiftly spun into a downward spiral of craziness. After Verigin’s assassination, a radical splinter broke off from the Doukhobors. This radical splinter of what was already a radical splinter of the Russian Orthodox Church rejected the modern world. More accurately, they rejected what little there was of the modern world in the Canadian sticks, where they dwelt.

7. Naked Parades

The radical Spirit Warrior faction advocated avoidance of the trappings of modern society in everything, from the exploitation of animals to the use of electricity. In a tragic twist, their “advocacy” went beyond the adoption of a simple life for themselves. Like a deranged Quaker Al Qaeda in Canada’s back of beyond, they paraded naked to emulate the simple lives of Adam and Eve. They also terrorized, burned the homes, and destroyed the material goods of other Doukhobors who dared partake of modernity. The Canadian authorities had their hands full trying to deal with the radical Russian religious migrants. Mass naked parades would probably raise eyebrows today. Back in the early twentieth century, the Doukhobor splinter faction – who eventually named themselves The Freedomites – shocked sensibilities when they conducted mass protests in the buff.

6. From Passive Protesters to Active Persecutors

In one Doukhobor nudist epidemic, police sprinkled itching powder on the protesters. In 1932, the Canadian Parliament criminalized public nudity, and the courts began to penalize the Spirit Warriors’ naked protests with prison sentences of about three years per offense. When yet another mass naked march scandalized British Columbia in 1932, over 600 Doukhobor men and women were banished to serve prison terms in Piers Island, BC. In a way, the naked protesters’ passive resistance exasperated Canadian authorities like Gandhi’s passive resistance exasperated the British in India at the time. More worrisome and tragic, however, was when the Freedomites went from passive protest and began to actively persecute other Spirit Warriors. Specifically, those whom they judged to have become too worldly, and to have abandoned the simple life appropriate for Doukhobors.

5. Freedomite Guerrilla Warfare and the Seizure of Doukhobor Children

Radical Spirit Warriors repeatedly raided the villages of other Doukhobors to burn their homes and dynamite their factories to punish them for straying from the simple life. For decades, the Freedomites waged a virtual guerrilla war in British Columbia against the modern world, and especially against other Spirit Warriors whom they viewed as backsliders. From 1923 to 1962, the Freedomites were responsible for over 1100 bomb and arson attacks. The authorities fought back with harsh sentences of up to three years imprisonment for naked protesters. They also seized the sect’s children, separated them from their families, and sent them to be raised in foster care or at state institutions. As happened with Indigenous children, albeit on a smaller scale, the forcibly seized Doukhobor children suffered sundry abuses. Decades later, the authorities offered the survivors an apology and C$10 million by way of belated atonement and compensation.

4. A Bombing Campaign in Rural Canada

The violence continued, however, and culminated in a series of 259 bombings in 1962 in just one region of British Columbia. Targets included railways, power lines and stations, ferries, courthouses, hotels, and the destruction of entire villages. The authorities finally decapitated the sect in March, 1962, with the arrest of sixty of its leaders, whom they charged with conspiracy to intimidate the Canadian Parliament and the Legislature of British Columbia. With their leaders locked up, the remaining Doukhobors rapidly assimilated into Canadian society. Relative peace has reigned since, and Canadian Spirit Warrior numbers have dwindled from a peak of 40,000 in the twentieth century to about 2,200 in 2011.

3. Canadian Authorities’ Most Venal Policy re Vulnerable Children?

The Canadian authorities’ handling of Indigenous and Doukhobor children was tragic. However, for sheer venality, those episodes are eclipsed by the authorities’ handling of what came to be known as the Duplessis Orphans. Until the mid-twentieth century, the Catholic Church held significant, and sometimes pernicious, sway over Quebec. The 1940s and 1950s in particular were an era of widespread poverty, few social services, and Church predominance. In those dark days, Maurice Duplessis, a strict Catholic, became premier of Quebec. He immediately proceeded to place the province’s schools, orphanages, and hospitals, in the hands of various Catholic religious orders.

2. Transforming Orphans Into Psychiatric Patients

Maurice Duplessis hatched a scheme with Church authorities to game the Canadian federal government’s subsidy assistance program to the provinces. The idea was to divert as many taxpayer dollars as possible into the coffers of Quebec’s Catholic Church. Canada’s federal subsidy program incentivized healthcare and the construction of hospitals, more so than other social programs and infrastructures. Provinces received a federal contribution of about C$1.25 a day for every orphan, but more than twice that, C$2.75, for every psychiatric patient. So Duplessis and Quebec’s Catholic Church decided to transform C$1.25-a-day orphans into more profitable C$2.75-a-day psychiatric patients. In order to exploit the Canadian federal government’s subsidy program, Duplessis and Quebec’s Catholic Church conspired to turn C$1.25-a-day orphans into C$2.75-a-day psychiatric patients. To carry out their scheme and siphon more federal subsidy dollars, Quebec’s Catholic Church and Maurice Duplessis set up a system to falsely diagnose orphans as mentally deficient.

1.     Falsifying Orphans’ Psychiatric Diagnoses for Profit

Duplessis signed an order that instantly transformed Quebec’s orphanages into hospitals. That entitled their religious order administrators – and ultimately the Catholic Church of Quebec – to receive the higher subsidy rates for hospitals. By the time the scandalous state of affairs was finally uncovered decades later, over 20,000 otherwise mentally sound Quebecoise orphans had been misdiagnosed with psychiatric ailments. Once they were misdiagnosed, the orphans were declared “mentally deficient”. It was not just a paperwork technicality. Once misdiagnosed as “mentally deficient”, the orphans’ schooling stopped, and they became inmates in poorly supervised mental institutions. There, the children were often subjected by nuns and lay monitors to mental and all kinds of physical abuse. Decades later, Quebec’s government offered survivors a paltry compensation of about C$25,000 each. It was still more redress than that offered by the Catholic Church, which still disputes the claims of those seeking compensation for harm done.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Canada’s Human Rights History – Duplessis Orphans

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – Children Held in BC Doukhobor Camp 1950s Offered $10M Compensation Package

Canadian Encyclopedia – Doukhobors

Clement, Dominique – Canada’s Rights Revolution: Social Movement and Social Change, 1937-82 (2008)

Indian Country Today, June 30^th, 2021 – 182 Unmarked Graves Found at Third Former Residential School

Indigenous Foundations – The Residential School System

Live Science – Remains of More Than 1000 Indigenous Children Found at Former Residential Schools in Canada

New York Times, May 21^st, 1993 – Orphans of the 1950s, Telling of Abuse, Sue Quebec

Russian Review, Vol. 21, No. 3 (July, 1962) – The Sons of Freedom and the Promised Land